@kkarhan @PiTau @rysiek He does actually point out some alternatives from time to time, though maybe he does that more often on Fedi than on his site, I haven't really been paying attention that closely.
Also, we've yet to even just catch back up with what Lisp Machines were doing 20~30 years ago in terms of system design. There has been a lot of unix-brained regression that needs to be addressed before blaming any other party.
(And Microsoft dropped the last hope for common & good sense to prevail in their ecosystem back in 2015 so that's the end of the line for them too.)
We're still writing new C code, despite knowing full well that's a terrible idea and having decades of easily-avoidable incident after incident to back that assertion. We've had perfectly viable alternatives for over two decades now, even in embedded spaces.
The entire mobile ecosystem has been nothing but an avoidable disaster made-up of bad decisions from the start.
The realization that the clearnet is fundamentally broken as anything but a routing layer isn't anything new either. I2P is 20 years old. And yet we still see new deployments on the clearnet and mass direct reliance on that transport layer despite knowing full-well its physical makeup has been purposely sabotaged to facilitate censorship and disruption whenever it's politically expedient in a lot of countries.
And right, disruption tolerance, that's something the internet, TCP stack and low-latency networking in general completely ignores (yeah unfortunately I2P also loses on that one). Any reasonable assessment of the infrastructural difficulties that are routinely observed on a daily basis around the world should be enough to conclude that medium-diverse/independent/agnostic Asynchronous Communication is a basic requirement and paradigm to build around, because infrastructure capable of lending itself to low-latency communication cannot be meaningfully assumed anywhere.
(By the way, neither Fidonet nor Usenet made such assumptions about infrastructure. We've regressed a lot.)
We've also had ample time to observe that centralized infrastructures are basically optimized for easy takedowns, and yet the majority of current systems are still neither distributed nor P2P.
So yeah, I don't know, I don't think all of that can be blamed on the FSF when there's a lot of corposcum and malicious government intervention that directly contributed to this state of affairs.